MPs discussed the weekend murders in Northern Ireland yesterday. The event - the first killing of British soldiers for 12 years - brought the terrible reminder of past griefs, and the condemnations we have heard a thousand times in the past 40 years. "Barbaric", "criminal" , "ruthless", "callous and brutal", all of them perfectly true. Also, often, "cowardly", a word that gains nothing by repetition.

It may be evil, vicious, psychopathic and loathsome to attack an army base, but it is not cowardly. We need to understand the mindset of people who can actually think of pizza delivery guys as "collaborators". They are plainly twisted and odious to a degree we can scarcely comprehend, but they do possess some of the courage we so freely attribute to those who are on our side, and we forget that at our peril.

The members also mobilised a host of resonant phrases, rather like the new decimal coins - freshly minted, yet much the same as the old ones. "The men of violence will not succeed. These crimes will not succeed. Not now. Not ever," said Shaun Woodward, secretary of state. "They may cut down two young men on a Saturday night, but they will not cut down the democratic will of the people," said Mark Durkan of the SDLP, a party label that also brings a certain nostalgic frisson of the past.

These are the kind of things that have been said so often, so many times, so sadly, over so many decades. Yet there was something different yesterday, a new, lighter, more hopeful tone. Why, even the old IRA in the persons of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had managed to find words of condemnation, and anyone who knows Irish history can recognise the significance of that. (Yet the mood of determined reconciliation does not extend to those two MPs taking up their Westminster seats.)

Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat, struck the mood of Obama-like hope: "What we saw on Saturday night was not a gllimpse of the future, but a reflection of the past." And Peter Robinson, the DUP leader, caught a realistic note when he said that there was no such thing as a "mindless" terrorist attack. "Every terrorist attack has a purpose - in this case, to drag us back to the bad old bloody days of the past."

Then we heard from Ian Paisley. The old Galapagos turtle raised himself with difficulty to his feet. His words are increasingly difficult to make out, but the meaning was plain enough. He was praising the Roman Catholic priest in Antrim who had led his parishioners in praying for the souls of the victims. "It was one of the greatest speeches I have ever heard from a man of the cloth," said Paisley, "and that takes some kind of strength in a place like Antrim. We will see something from this - something we never thought we would see."

Paisley praises Catholic cleric! It has taken many decades, and now two more dreadful murders, but maybe at last we are getting there.